Aug 2026· Journal of Labor and Society· Vol 29, pp. 351-384· 0 citations· 48 references
Abstract
Since the mid-2000s, online labor platforms (OLPs) have emerged as vehicles for economic imperialism in the digitally deliverable services sector. By providing capital with instant access to inexpensive digital labor in the periphery, OLPs enable global North firms to bypass the costs associated with foreign direct investment and transnational labor migration while subjecting workers to conditions of super-exploitation. Drawing on Marxist unequal exchange theory, this paper develops the concept of digital labor arbitrage to explain how OLPs facilitate the transfer of value from periphery to core in this strategically significant sector of the global political economy. It argues that this process reinforces US dominance in key areas, including global technological infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The paper underscores the role of OLPs in perpetuating underdevelopment and considers China’s technological and digital sovereignty as a potential challenge to 21
st
-century imperialism.
The digitalization of the economy is reshaping labor division while intensifying employment polarization and income inequality. Unlike conventional human capital or skill‐biased technological change perspectives that treat digitalization as neutral progress, this study reconceptualizes it—grounded in Marxist politica...
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This chapter examines how digital platforms, as infrastructures of extractivism in contemporary artificial intelligence, enable corporations to appropriate data and labour while concentrating value in core regions such as Silicon Valley. It proposes platform extractivism as a framework linking commodification, epistemi...
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Digital infrastructure has fundamentally altered the conditions under which firms of almost any size locate customers, recruit suppliers, and build commercial relationships abroad, sometimes within weeks of founding. Nowhere is this tension between established theory and lived reality more visible than across Africa, w...
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